Logicalis US: ITSM Isn’t Just for IT Anymore

NEW YORK, July 11, 2017 – Among CIOs and other top IT professionals, the concept of IT Service Management (ITSM) has become synonymous with buzzwords like “automation” and “efficiency” – and with good reason. As IT organizations implemented frameworks and “best practices” like ITIL to help them operate more effectively, ITSM quickly became known as an IT solution. ITSM toolsets were created to help IT organizations become more agile through the automation of key processes. Books were written about ITSM. And soon, realizing the gains in growth and expansion made possible through IT service management processes, nearly every IT department had jumped on the ITSM bandwagon. Today, however, Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), says ITSM isn’t just for IT anymore.

“What if the same successes seen with IT Service Management could be applied in other areas of an organization’s business?” asks Mike Alley, Service Management Principal, Logicalis US. “The truth is, they can. IT Service Management principles did not create new tasks or new functions for IT; they helped make the tasks and functions the IT staff was already doing better. They ensured more accuracy, less risk and a lower cost for compliance in IT. And because many of the non-IT tasks and functions employees are doing today are also process driven, the same methodologies and platforms applied to IT can be applied to processes outside IT to drive similar efficiencies in most business divisions.”

Four Benefits of Enterprise Service Management

Enterprise service management uses the same principles and toolsets as ITSM, but moves these principles into new departments ranging from finance and legal to facilities and field services. By doing so, organizations can realize significantly broader companywide efficiencies. To help CXOs weigh the advantages of enterprise service management, the experts at Logicalis US have identified four critical benefits.

Improved Daily Operations: Just as IT can use service management principles to increase agility and reduce costs, so can other departments within nearly every organization. Case in point: Logicalis recently helped a large media and entertainment company realize significant operational improvements by running its popular broadcast operations via a service management platform. The organization wanted to improve the speed with which it responded to disruptions in broadcast signals. With an enterprise service management solution, the right audio-visual expert is now automatically notified when an incident occurs, a significant improvement over manual processes that has dramatically reduced the organization’s time to remediation.

Higher Customer Satisfaction: According to a ServiceNow study conducted by Intergram Research*, organizations that excel in customer service are 29 percent more likely to have satisfied customers and 42 percent more likely to earn greater customer loyalty. For one of Logicalis’ banking customers, excelling in customer service meant developing a more effective process for answering customer inquiries. When the bank’s clients called their local branch with a question, the person answering the phone took the message by hand, then researched who within the bank’s network of professionals would best be able to assist the customer. At times, days passed before the appropriate person was located, given the message and able to respond – a frustrating process for the customer and branch alike. By automating the service request function, Logicalis was able to help the bank capture and immediately route customer inquiries to the appropriate people within its organization, solving an important customer satisfaction pain point with a very basic enterprise service management solution.

Compliance Risk and Cost Reduction: How much money can be saved companywide by reducing the time and effort involved in routine everyday tasks? In a Human Resources (HR) department alone, for example, imagine the potential time savings in onboarding and offboarding employees if repeatable activities could be automated. Rather than calling facilities and having an office and phone assigned, then calling IT for a new computer or laptop, with an enterprise service management solution, all of the needed approvals could be obtained and tasks completed through an automated workflow before the employee’s start date. Facilities and IT would receive specific tasks with a trackable SLA; if those SLAs were not met by a specified date and time, they would be escalated to a department manager. Access to various applications could also be granted or denied this way as well, providing an audit trail particularly useful for compliance purposes.

To learn just how useful enterprise service management can be outside the IT department, ServiceNow commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine service management’s potential return on investment. According to the Forrester report**, a large healthcare client with 20,000 employees implemented an HR service management platform for employee onboarding and offboarding; in just three years, the organization had reduced its compliance costs by $225,000, reduced the number of cases its HR team handled by 50 percent, realized a 30 percent increase in the efficiency with which it handled its remaining cases, and saved $9.9 million in the process.

Better Resource Management: When employees focus less time on routine tasks, their talents can be put to better, more strategic uses within the business. A manufacturing client of Logicalis’, for example, was experiencing a supply chain issue with a higher than normal number of defects in products being delivered to its stores. By applying a service portal for its stores to accurately report defects and coupling that with the same incident management processes long used in IT departments, the organization was able to use the consolidated data it received to identify and correct the issue, saving employees throughout the operation time and effort investigating individual defect reports. By automating key processes and cataloguing important information – whether it’s for a healthcare organization’s HR department, a manufacturer’s production floor, or an entertainment company’s broadcast division – expanding service management processes from IT to individual business units allows companies to better manage their resources, focusing employee time and attention on tasks that are more valuable and strategic to the business as a whole.

** ServiceNow Research: “The Total Economic Impact of ServiceNow HR Service Management: How a $4 Billion Healthcare Provider Saves $9 Million by Consumerizing the Employee Service Experience,” Forrester Consulting, March 2017.

Want to Learn More?

Did you know that Logicalis was recognized this year by ServiceNow as the Services Partner with the highest 2016 customer satisfaction rating? Read more here: http://ow.ly/kR7K30cJ4e8.

Explore five innovative ways ITSM solutions can help CIOs align IT initiatives with business priorities: http://ow.ly/HMYX30cJ4AT.

CIOs: Download an eBook offering valuable advice on using IT Operations Management to become a more strategic player in your organization: http://ow.ly/ZYaX30cJ4M8.

About Logicalis

Logicalis is an international multi-skilled solution provider providing digital enablement services to help customers harness digital technology and innovative services to deliver powerful business outcomes.

We are the advocates for our customers for some of the world’s leading technology companies including Cisco, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Microsoft, VMware and ServiceNow.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of over $1.5 billion from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific and Africa. It is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and the AIM market of the LSE, with revenues of over $6.5 billion.